p
more clearly the deadly pale face, set and more determined than
before.

For as he stood, pale and silent, the shaft of a terrible
pain,--of broken bone and lacerated muscle--twinged and twitched
his arm, and to smother it and keep from crying out he gripped
bloodlessly--nervously--the stock of his pistol saying over and over:

"I am a Conway again--a man again!"

And so standing he defied them and they halted, like sheep at the
door of the shambles. The sheriff had flown, and Conway alone stood
between the frenzied mob and the old woman who had given her all for
him.

He could hear her praying within--an uncanny mixture of faith and
miracle--of faith which saw as Paul saw, and which expected angels to
come and break down her prison doors. And after praying she would
break out into a song, the words of which nerved the lone man who
stood between her and death:

"'I'm a pilgrim, and I'm a stranger,
I can tarry, I can tarry but a night.
Do not detain me, for I am going
To where the streamlets are ever flowing.
I'm a pilgrim--and I'm a stranger
I can tarry--I can tarry but a night.'"

And now the bonfire burned brighter, lighting up the scene--the
shambling stores around the jail on the public square, the better
citizens making appeals in vain for law and order, the shouting,
fool-hardy mob, waiting for Richard Travis to say the word, and he
sitting among them pale, and terribly silent with something in his
face they had never seen there before.

Nor would he give the command. He had nothing against Edward
Conway--he did not wish to see him killed.

And the mob did not attack, although they cursed and bluffed, because
each one of them knew it meant death--death to some one of them, and
that one might be--I!

Between life and death "I" is a bridge that means it all.

A stone wall ran around the front of the jail. A small gate opened
into the jail-yard. At the jail door, covering that opening, stood
Edward Conway.

They tried parleying with him, but he would have none of it.

"Go back--" he said, "I am the sheriff here--I am the law. The man
who comes first into that gate will be the first to die."

In ten minutes they made their attack despite the commands of their
leader, who still sat his horse on the public square, pale and with a
bitter conflict raging in his breast.

With shouts and curses and a headlong rush they went. Pistol bullets
flew around Conway's head a